Earth Mother - Get Ready to Garden with Kids

Moscow Food Co-op Earth Mother

Get Ready to Garden with Kids

by Julia Parker, from the March 2007 Newsletter

March brings with it the hope of fresh new life. Whether wild or tame, all growing things stir with the warmer air, rains and sunlight. Whether wild or tame, our young ones need to learn first hand about this beautiful season and the life it brings. At our house, we look at seed catalogues with all the enthusiasm that fiancées read Bride magazine. Dog-earing page after page until they are almost all marked. Here I’ve compiled a few ideas and tips on early garden projects. I hope you will share these with the young ones in your life.

Big and Beautiful
Kids love plants that are over-the-top. Giant sunflowers, huge pumpkins, tall hollyhocks, extra long cucumbers can be started indoors soon. Try to keep your starts to a small number. Having six flats of pots started in the dining room window begins to get a little old and overwhelming after the first few days of excitement dissipate. If you are planting these giants, know that they will eventually take up lots of space in your garden so you probably don’t want dozens of them anyway. Mark your young ones and your plants growth through a series of photos during the summer.

Follow the directions below on planting indoors.

Grazing Garden
When my son was about four we planted a few plants in our 1’ x 8’allotted space in front of student housing at Michigan State. We grew a few flowers and lots of snow peas. I don’t believe any of those snow peas ever made it into our apartment. Joshua and I would find them after school and eat them as they ripened right from the plant. It’s nice to be able to have vegetables or fruits that kids can graze on at their leisure. Strawberries, compact and hardy, are a wonderful plant to grow for kids. Snow peas are another good choice for little hands to pick and eat. The list of edible peas in the pod is long and you can try a few varieties. The large seeds make them easy for little hands to plant. They do well in cool weather too, but need a trellis.

Have your child try a few different tastes in your grazing garden by growing chives with edible flowers and stalks. Nasturtiums have edible flowers, but these “nose twisters” have a peppery taste. Lovage tastes like celery and its hollow stalks can be used like straws. You need to be able to trust your child not to eat at random in the yard if you grow a grazing garden and encourage eating “strange” things like flowers.

Windowsill and Container Gardens
If you’re new to gardening, afraid of gardening, are mobile, or don’t have a square foot of dirt to dig in take time to grow some food in your windowsill. Watching plants change from seed to cotyledon to sprout and beyond is a great experience — full of magic and wonder for both children and adults. Indoor container gardens should be placed in a sunny area of your home. Make sure the temperatures remain around 60 to 70 degrees. A blasting heating vent or a chilly, drafty window can ruin your indoor garden. Containers can be planted inside with herbs such as parsley (my personal favorite as a child), chives or chamomile. Each of these can be cut back and used as they grow over time. All you need for your indoor container garden is soil, water, seeds and sun. And, be creative in finding a container for your plants — an old tea cup with a few pebbles in the bottom for drainage, or a worn out soccer ball with a section cut out of the top will do nicely. If you really feel like a brown thumb or are just in need of an ultra-easy container garden look for the Potting Shed Creations gardens in a bag at the Co-op. These container gardens are made in locally and have everything you need on one neat package.

Outdoors, containers of all kinds make great small gardens for kids. A barrel, a box, a worn out boot, old pots, and lined laundry baskets can all serve as garden foundations. Remember that containers dry out faster than garden soil and will need to be watered more often. When seeds are first placed in any of these gardens the soil should be kept moist all the time until the plants are well established.

So, it’s March. Get your seed catalogues out and ready and start growing!

Julia Parker lives in Moscow. She is still grateful that her friends Paul and Heather rototilled her garden last year as a new baby gift.

Copyright: Copyright on articles and recipes are jointly held by the Moscow Food Co-op and the respective authors, except were otherwise noted.

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